Industrialising a Fairy Tale

Each fairy tale is a separate little jewel of obsessions – about raw materials (food! dowries!) and processes (solving riddles! seeking success!) – and its remaking ought to be easy enough to industrialise, right? Particularly since steampunk is a derivative genre, always referring to alternatives, and finding new ones…

Yet it’s not always possible to mass-produce a trinket out of the same materials: sometimes, the process of manufacture breaks everything;and sometimes, the old purpose and meaning of the item have simply faded away.

With the starvation era of subsistence agriculture now in the past for the developed world, hunger is no longer a threat to tell tales about – quite the opposite! Yet although starvation no longer prompts parents to infanticide, infant and childhood dangers persist, and still culminate at times in death. Exactly the right stakes for a fairy tale.